Factors Influencing Customer Loyalty Essay

The financial services and banking facilities industry has seen a growing intensity of competition within the market place over the last decade. A bank is a financial intermediary that accepts deposits and channels those deposits into lending activities, either directly or through capital markets. A bank connects customers with capital deficits to customers with capital surpluses. Banking is generally a highly regulated industry, and government restrictions on financial activities by banks have varied over time and location. Today, CIMB serves close to seven million customers in over 600 locations through over 36,000 staff. Nowadays, financial services and banking facilities has force to pass by intense competition by other bank that growth from inside also outside this country because of the regulation for financial institution to establish was deregulation by government, and causing the adding in growth of the bank in Malaysia. Thus, people also have various banks to choose and directly give the big impact to manager of bank to search the way to enhance the loyalty of current customer from switching to other bank. They are many strategies that have been attempted by managers of the banks to retain customers in order to increase customer loyalty. It is costly than to attract new customer compared to retain the current customers. Thus, many banks have introduced innovative products and services (Alam and Khokhar, 2006) in order to retain current customers. Another strategy is to understand the factors influencing customer loyalty. Figure 1: Graph profit of Agrobank Seri Iskandar branch in April 2009 until April 2010 1. 2. Background of the organization Agrobank is an institution which provides holistic financial services and banking facilities. It give their utmost priority to the needs of their customers by providing attractive products and services such as savings activities, banking services, loan facilities, insurance coverage and advisory services. Agrobank is a Government-linked-Company (GLC) under the Minister of Finance Incorporated (MFI). The bank’s financing of the agricultural sector is driven by a policy set forth by the Ministry of Agriculture and Agro-based Industries. Agrobank is a continuity of the former Bank Pertanian Malaysia which has 40 years of experience in agricultural banking and an excellent track record in shaping and developing successful entrepreneurs. With a wide network of branches throughout Malaysia, they are confident of providing the best services to all. The rebranding of Bank Pertanian Malaysia to Agro Bank was done on 8 April 2008. The move is taken as an initiative to make the bank more competitive by fostering a fresher outlook, and enable it to provide a broader range of services to the market and cater the whole segment of the agriculture industry. An external consultant was deployed to carry out the public relation (PR) and rebranding exercise for Agrobank, penetrate the market and create awareness among the public. The solutions include Agrobanking, Business Banking, and Personal Banking. 1. 3. 1 Agrobanking Loan facility / financing offered under Agrobanking are open to agropreneurs clients carry out primary agricultural activities such as fisheries, forestry, livestock and any other related agro-based industry. Financing utilizing fund from the government and related agencies which is offered at a very competitive and special rate to help stimulate economic growth. This includes; i. Fund for Food (3F loan) ii. Skim Kredit Pengeluaran Makanan (SKPM) iii. Skim Kredit Padi (SKP) iv. The researcher was interested in predicting what the factors influencing customer loyalty toward AgroBank Seri Iskandar. Variables such as satisfaction, switching cost, trust and commitment might all contribute towards customer loyalty. When using multiple regressions in psychology, researchers use the term â€Å"independent variables† to identify those variables that they think will influence some other â€Å"dependent variable†. Thus, in as an example above, satisfaction, switching cost, trust and commitment would emerge as significant predictor variables, which allow researcher to estimate the criterion variable. As have pointed out before, human behavior is inherently noisy and therefore it is not possible to produce totally accurate predictions, but multiple regressions allows researcher to identify a set of predictor variables which together provide a useful estimate of a participant’s likely score on a criterion variable. Multiple regression analysis is done to examine the simultaneous effect of several independent variables on dependent variables. Multiple regression analysis can be used in order to determine whether the independent variables explain a significant variation in the dependent variable which is whether a relationship exists.